Memory of Heaven
by Corbeaun
Summary: The passage of the sun will represent heaven, the bones will represent time.


Memory of Heaven

Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia  
Written for: banthafodder in the Yuletide 2004 Challenge  
by Corbeau Noir

Sometimes Edmund remembers peering through the window at the hollow-eyed faces of those left on the station as his train pulled away. Life in Narnia is soft sunshine and newborn possibilities. Desperate war-wracked London and his life there seem as distant as Aslan's country across the sea, and yet still they rouse him from the pleasant dream that is now his life in Narnia. "Edmund," Lucy would ask, those first few months after the coronation when she finds him sleepless and dark-eyed beneath a starlit sky whose constellations he cannot recognize, "what makes you so sad?" The strange, heavy words -- _trains, ration-books, air-raids_ -- that would explain him stop at the back of his teeth, making him stutter, all frustrated helplessness and animal dumb, until finally he turns from her in defeat. He sees that not even she remembers. It is springtime at last for Narnia, a land broken from the hold of winter, and there is so much to be thankful for. But his sleeping dreams are filled with silver birds and fire streaking a foreign sky.

Only the fickleness of his memories keeps him from going mad. Moon-touched, bewitched, the whispers accuse him. Sharp tongues, sharp eyes in sharp shrewd faces. Edmund cannot gainsay them. When the awareness of his old life comes upon him, in fits like madness, he wonders if this is the price he must pay for his betrayal. If he tries, he can still feel the cold touch of the Witch's fingers on his neck.

In the summer, the eastern sea gleams darkly from his bedroom window. He opens the iron shutters to let in the salt sea breeze, and when he leans out the window he hears the joyous cries of the merpeople calling to one another across the inlet. In the wintertime, storms churn the smooth dark waters into frothing grey waves, and the shuttered windows close him in within his restless sleep.

The Witch's lips were bittersweet, like the last dregs of honeyed tea. Fevered adolescent dreams hook him with false-memories and in long winter nights he twists and slides like a caught fish between sheets made slippery with his sweat. He braves the frosted river waters but to no avail. Neither the smooth cool hands of the Naiads give respite, nor his own. "Edmund," Peter frowns reprovingly, in that remote and stately way of his, when stories reach the High King's Dias of the younger King slipping naked through moonlit waters.

Edmund hears stories too, carried on the Eastern wind.

The stronghold of the giants is now silent and shrouded in snow, comes whispers from beyond the Lantern Waste. The High King once caught an old woman fleeing north. "We have seen Her," crowed the Hag, flying spittle and exultant glee. She spat at the four of them -- Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund -- alternately laughing and cursing, even when her hoarse voice drowned into liquid gurgles. As the good Beasts stretched her over the wheel (witch wheel to break witch powers), brittle old woman's frame over heavy wooden spokes, she said, "You can't truly kill a witch." And Edmund trembled, but not in fear.

They took the broken body and burned it to prevent the Hag from being brought back to life. The ashes they scattered to the wind.

Such was not done for the White Witch. Edmund recalls the battle only vaguely, more from what is sung by the court bards than from any self-recollection. He remembers that day only as a haze of disjointed pain. When he'd woken from his fevered dreams, the body of the Witch was long gone. No one knew where. Stolen, so the official story goes, by the werewolves or the succubus or the rest of the Witch's fleeing ragtag army. The unofficial story is told in hushed voices only in the darkest hours of a winter night. But when no sudden cold front sweeps through the newly greening land, that story falls untold except in the most hidden crevices of Narnia where dark creatures huddle against discovery.

Snow falls no more on Narnia, as if to compensate for the past hundred years of white silence. The coldest months of the year only blight the grass and frost the trees, brushing the clothing of Dryads in silver.

In the winter, Edmund turns his face southward, toward Archenland and beyond, away from the dangerous chill in his heart that draws him to the snow covered Wild Lands of the North.

Lucy likes to come with him on those trips. They take neither the royal galleon Splendor Hyaline nor any retinue. The first time they went together, they sailed incognito on a Galmian merchant ship bound for the Calormene port city of Zelindrah, and Lucy slipped into the boy role so easily that Edmund knew it not to be the first. Sometimes Lucy goes by herself to foreign ports, with her yellow hair tucked under cap and soft girl curves bound, on those short winter days when the sun shines too brightly and the audience hall of Cair Paravel is empty. "Call me, Boy, if you wish brother, should my sex bother you overmuch," she laughed that first time as she picked up the reins of their packhorses to lead them abroad ship. She looked for all the world like an all too pretty boy trembling between childhood and man.

It is a declaration of war for a sovereign of Narnia to set foot upon the Tisroc's land without invitation. Neither Peter the High King nor Susan would not act so rashly, with a pretense so thin as the ragged tunics of a less-than-prosperous Northern minstrel, and his sweet-voiced brother. "I have sung in the courts of the Barbarian Lords and danced with demons under moonless nights," he sang on the docks of Zelindrah, and his pretty brother' collected coins and food from the crowd of dark-faced Calormenes.

"Sing of Peter the Magnificent," called a servant girl, "how he slew a Wolf and claimed a maiden's kiss."

"Sing of Edmund the Just," laughed a sailor, "how he laid with the White Witch Queen in a Winter land."

The years pass. He's older now, tall and staid. The madness comes less often to him, and when it does it is another Edmund that wakes at nights with fire under his skin and shadows trembling in his mind.

Lucy, oh Lucy, this other him whispers into the darkness. Do you remember, do you remember? Our mother's face as our train pulled away. Our father's eyes as the first fire fell from the sky. A madman in a far off land. The world in flames. What was that place? Do you remember?

Home, Edmund? she would reply.

Home.

He tries the word on his tongue and it falls from him, a mouth full of ash. Home.

No. He turns from her, this Lucy whose eyes are bright with the spring of a younger world. No.

How can it be? He says. That world we remember, that mad mad world...

Nothing but a dream inside a dream, she agrees. A nightmare.

We are home.

__

The lions pass a thornbush and melt.  
Though the whole day is unbroken  
the passage of the sun will represent heaven  
the bones will represent time. 

-Josephine Jacobsen


End file.
